Last year @catnip and I facilitated a one-day (theatre-style) larp writer’s workshop at Petone Community House:
We’re thinking of doing another one, most likely on May 6 or 7. But what we’d like to know first is:
Interested! I need help with character sheets, specifically how to make sure there’s enough clear information without being overwhelming or dry
That’s often a matter of personal writing style - I approach character sheets as technical writing, aimed at conveying information, but that pushes towards dryness. Others try and put them in the character’s voice, or treat them as fanfic.TIMTOWTDI.
But last year the central part of the exercise was… writing character sheets, so you’d get some practice. Of course, that means deciding what to write…
I’d probably go again!!! 
We now have a facebook event for planning this. First question is the date: Saturday May 20 or Sunday May 21?
I’m terrible at Facebook, but I’m interested in going.
It’s interesting to see how other people make games.
Don’t worry - I’ll be making sure important information is here as well.
Do you have any preference between those two dates?
Saturday, but I’m not very picky.
It’s on:
When: Saturday, May 20, 2017, 10:00am - 6:00pm
Where: Room 6 (upstairs), Petone Community House, 6 Britannia St, Petone
How Much: TBA, but will be $5 - $10 for the day, depending on final costs.
Bring: Laptop, USB stick, brain, willingness to work with other people. Coffee provided.
For those wondering how this went: we had seven participants: five writers with varying levels of experience (from one game to more than ten), and two first-timers. We had a long period of discussion at the beginning, covering things we enjoyed / didn’t enjoy in larp, goals and ways of writing them, goal vs situation vs event/crew-driven games, and specific design issues around small games.
After a break for coffee we pitched ideas. The second idea we discussed was “space pirates”, which everyone was enthused by. Within an hour we had a bunch of ideas for a small game on the board, and after a break for lunch we gridded them up and assigned them to characters while refining them. That took us to our 4pm time limit, so we ended up not writing any characters. But we’re all keen and have set a deadline of next weekend to get our initial sheets in. Hopefully a blurb will be appearing here in due course.
Work-in-progress blurb:
Captain Steel was one of the most feared pirates of the spacelanes. But now she is dead, slain by one of her own officers. The crew of the Narwhal must elect a new Captain, and maybe decide to mete out justice to the murderer. But the space patrol is closing in, and there are other threats as well. Just what shady deals was Captain Steel involved in, and how much trouble has she gotten the crew into?